The Bureau of Reclamation released the Final Environmental Impact Statement for post-2026 Colorado River operations on July 31, the document that will govern how Lake Powell and Lake Mead are run through 2036 [1]. The centerpiece is what the Interior Department calls an adaptive decision framework: instead of fixing a single operating regime for a decade, the operating guidelines will be reissued at two-year intervals as conditions on the river change [1].
Two numbers set the outer walls. Annual releases from Lake Powell are bracketed between 5.0 and 12.0 million acre-feet [1]. Shortages in the Lower Basin can reach up to 3.0 million acre-feet [1].
That second figure needs a caveat the coverage tends to drop. The 3.0 million acre-feet is a collective ceiling across the Lower Basin, meaning Arizona, California, and Nevada together, under the framework. The release does not allocate the 3.0 million among the three states, and no per-state breakdown of cuts appears in it [1]. Any specific claim about what Arizona or California or Nevada individually stands to lose is not something this document supports.
The framework covers domestic operations only. A separate binational process with Mexico, which also draws on the river, is described in the release as "nearing completion" [1]. Until that process concludes, the international share of the river's future remains its own open file.
The final document lands after a comment process that ran through the winter. The draft EIS was released January 9, and the comment window closed March 2 after two public meetings; the process drew a reported 18,127 submissions, of which a reported 785 were unique submissions. Those two counts measure different things, total volume versus distinct content, and should not be blended into one number. The comment figures and process dates come from reporting on the process; the DOI release itself does not restate them.
What the release does not contain matters as much as what it does. It announces no Record of Decision date and no timeline for one. It publishes no per-state arithmetic. The question every Lower Basin water manager actually needs answered, how much of a 3.0 million acre-foot shortage lands on whom, remains unwritten, and the two-year reissue cycle the framework creates means the answer can change every other year through 2036 [1].
